notes
Deciding on abbreviations and acronyms
Our rule of thumb we settled on in our practice was to do a Google search. If either the abbreviation or acronym for the concept appeared “top of the fold”, we agreed that it was common parlance. Source
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notes
Goodhart Law
Employees are smart enough to know that if a measure is used to evaluate them, then they should optimize that measure. This is captured by Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
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notes
5 rules of life
Always be ready to reinvent yourself. Stay foolish for as long as you can, always in learning mode.
Act immediately when you feel inspired. Take advantage of your mood to act, don’t overthink it.
Don’t adjust yourself to please others. Be yourself, follow your own rules, live with the consequences.
Be minimal about the things you need. Don’t overspend on things you don’t really need, live a frugal life.
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notes
Procrastination
Procrastinators and blockers favor speed and immediacy over accuracy and constancy. Are generally more concerned about trying to manage short-term comfort than long-term effectiveness in solving important problems. So, to control their emotions, they procrastinate and block.
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notes
On feedback
When people tell you something is wrong, they’re usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re usually wrong.
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notes
Rule of three
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we are almost always wrong.
It is three times as difficult to build reusable components as single use components, and a reusable component should be tried out in three different applications before it will be sufficiently general to accept into a reuse library.
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notes
The Pitch for Enterprise Architecture
Many things in this organization operate in siloes - business functions, business processes, IT applications, infrastructure teams etc - it’s the nature of organizations.
However, this can add cost, complexity, and risk because different teams go in different directions, duplicating things or conflicting with each other - IT is not aligned with the business, or the business itself is not aligned.
In addition, each team / silo is naturally incented to make decisions that are best for them, but not necessarily best for the org as a whole - who is looking at the overall big picture?
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